Music: What Price Pavarotti Inc.?

In a new role, the one-man conglomerate sells singing short

The opera probably should have been called Verdi’s Radames instead of Aida. Never mind that more important roles are assigned to the eponymous soprano heroine and her mezzo nemesis, Amneris. In San Francisco last week, the attention and the money (up to $750 for scalpers’ tickets) was on the tenor. Of course, the man who was singing Verdi’s Egyptian captain for the first time in his career was no ordinary performer: it was the portly mink-coat model, frequent guest on the Tonight show, American Express-card pitchman, would-be movie star and, these days, part-time primissimo tenore. Yes, Giorgio, there is still a Luciano Pavarotti, superstar.

But at what price? What has become of the sweet voice that made its owner the most affecting Rodolfo of his generation in Puccini’s La Bohemel What has befallen the technique that allowed Pavarotti to toss off the famous nine high Cs in an aria from Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment with the effortless abandon that marks only the greatest tenors? What has happened to the suave phrasing and sure sense of style, which made his recording of Nessun dorma from Turandot an example to musicians everywhere? Have Pavarotti’s duties as operatic emissary to the world begun to interfere with what got him the job in the first place—his voice? The answer, alas, appears to be yes.

At the San Francisco Opera’s glittering new production of Aida, a capacity audience—plus 3,000 more Pavarotti fans, watching a closed-circuit broadcast in a nearby auditorium, as well as live-television viewers in Germany, Austria and Spain—saw and heard him struggle unsuccessfully against the vocally ungrateful requirements of Radames. Not content with being the world’s foremost lyric tenor, Pavarotti in recent years has been moving into the heavier spin to repertory, forsaking the Lord Arthur Talbots and Tonios of Bellini and Donizetti for roles that call for weightier, more declamatory singing—Enzo in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, for example, and Riccardo in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. In doing so, however, Pavarotti has sacrificed much of his freshness and lyric bloom.

Last week the only “money” note for the tenor in Aida—the high B-flat at the end of Celeste Aida—was rough and ragged, belted out with a desperate fortissimo instead of the more difficult pianissimo that Verdi called for in the score. Elsewhere, Pavarotti’s eyes clung to the safety of the prompter’s box and the conductor’s baton, leaving most of the acting to Soprano Margaret Price (battling a bronchial infection but singing well nonetheless) and Stefania Toczyska, a sultry Polish mezzo and a star of the future, whose Amneris blazed with passionate fury.

One wonders why Pavarotti, 46, is risking his voice and reputation on parts that do not fit him. But then for Luciano Pavarotti Inc., a multinational conglomerate, singing appears on its way to becoming a sideline in a continuing manufacture of commercialism and hype. No doubt Pavarotti, as his voice naturally darkens with age, will keep on exploring new repertory, in part to keep pace with his chief rival for tenoristic supremacy, Placido Domingo, whose voice is more versatile and better suited to such an undertaking. There are still flashes of the old form, as in the recent London recording of La Traviata, on which Lucianissimo sings Alfredo’s De’ miei bollenti spiriti with his talent in full cry. But such moments in live performances over the past couple of years are becoming steadily rarer. What becomes a legend most? In Pavarotti’s case, singing well.

—By Michael Walsh